ABSTRACT
Hyperobjects are, according to Tim Morton (2007, 2013), immense objects that transcend time and space specificities, comprising elements from gas emissions captured in the atmosphere and the oceans to the global use of pesticides in the agroindustries for export. They are hyper in the sense they don’t allow for a stark division between the global, the local and the body. Influenced by modern thought and for the economic practices of the global order, hyperobjects—as they are defined by Morton—emerge in a moment of ecological crisis, blurring the material, spatial, and temporary borders. If modernity brought about an objectified nature, the immediate present adds to this landscape an era of objectified bodies: vulnerable bodies that were both exposed and contaminated through what Rob Nixon called, rightly, slow violence. In the present moment, when the question about the future is open to speculation, how is the body inserted into this map where environmental degradation filtrates to the point of transforming bodies into mutations? Which discourses go through the natural world space, and how are “healthy” and “sick” bodies defined? In this chapter, I analyze three novels, Las estrellas federales (Juan Diego Incardona, 2016), La vi mutar (Natalia Rodríguez, 2013), and Distancia de rescate (Samanta Schweblin, 2015), and the poetry collection Un pequeño enfermo (Julián Joven, 2014), which anticipate, through the transformation and mutation of bodies, the degradation of these bodies as the last frontier of environmental pollution and destruction.
